Human Position
by Shade Embry
Summary: Mason and his CTU confidant examine lost time behind closed doors.
1. Advisories With Sharp Wounds

TITLE: Human Position  
  
AUTHOR: Brittany "Thespis" Frederick  
  
E-MAIL: baltimorelt@yahoo.com  
  
RATING: PG for language  
  
CATEGORY: Drama, Missing Scene  
  
SUMMARY: Ever wonder what happens during that "lost time" between commercials? Well, Liz and Mason were having a discussion behind closed doors.  
  
ORIGINAL CHARACTER BIO: Liz Rycoff is CTU's Chief of Technology. She is close friends with Jack and with George Mason, and has a political alliance with Mason, who wants her to go to work for him at District, but Liz's loyalty to Jack holds her back.  
  
RECOMMENDED LISTENING: "Waiting" by The Devlins  
  
  
  
He walked her into the room, holding open the door as she strode past him. It was the same room off the main floor where he had interrogated Nina and Jamey during the lockdown, and the significance was not lost on her. She stared at him a moment as he shut the door behind himself.  
  
"Are you going to interrogate me now, George?"  
  
"Please. I didn't even call you in the first time."  
  
"Then why are we here?" Liz kept her voice calm and even. No sense in breaking protocol, breaking stride, without the demand to do so.  
  
Mason didn't answer immediately, instead crossed to a vacant chair and gestured for her to sit as he did. Liz noted he had a copy of her CTU section syllabus. The breakdown of her staff, organization, resources and plans, filed with Nina, approved by Jack and revised with the both of them at the beginning of the year. He looked at the document in his hands, then at her.  
  
"Have you thought about what you're going to do with Technology after today?" he asked her point-blank.  
  
"No, I've been on assignment." She thought that was obvious, which made her wonder what game he was playing now.  
  
"Jamey's gone."  
  
The two words stung, and the reminder she didn't want hit her in the stomach, though she never let him see it. Jamey Farrell had been her friend, her lieutenant, her confidante. Liz didn't take many friends in her line of work, mostly just allies and acquaintances, but she had always seen Jamey as trustworthy, the kind to take over her position when she retired. And…  
  
"And you want to reprimand me, as I was her boss, for her betrayal," she said with an edge to her tone, thinking these were more the accusations Chappelle was inclined to make, rather than her ally.  
  
He took this in stride. "I'm saying you're shorthanded."  
  
"Milo could stay on and I've got contacts at ECB," she said, naming her former Agency assignment. Certainly the Electronic Crimes Branch, which was basically the major pool of general technology specialists, could be trusted to provide some fresh blood. And Milo had quickly made himself indispensible. He was, after all, the only other specialist around.  
  
The two of them stared at each other for a minute.  
  
"This isn't about my section," Liz made it a statement.  
  
"Liz, at the end of the day Jack and Nina could both be gone…" Mason started warningly.  
  
"I don't want their jobs and I'm not qualified for either one." Liz made sure in her tone that there was no room for discussion.  
  
Both statements were true. Jack was her best friend and Nina a strong ally and she respected both. She had no desire to move up in the Agency and she was a computer specialist, not a chief of staff, not a unit leader. Jack could attest to that; she'd made an able chief during the Hotel Los Angeles, but she didn't have the field experience necessary and it showed.  
  
"Ryan Sealey doesn't see it that way," he told her.  
  
"I do."  
  
"I wish you didn't."  
  
"Can't grant you that one, George." She exhaled. "Things are happening today, and you want me to talk about my organizational plan and you want to warn me that my friends could be fired."  
  
"You always tell me that you want to know what happens," he said. "Well, this is what's happening, Elisabeth. CTU is collapsing, and you're at ground zero."  
  
-To Be Continued- 


	2. Betrayals From Strange Places

Human Position  
  
Segment Two  
  
"Who concocted that line, George? Chappelle?" Liz stood out of her chair, went to stalking through the cramped room. Mason looked hard at her. "You can break everything you want, yell all you feel like it, but it's not going to change anything," he reminded her.  
  
"I won't believe that."  
  
"You don't have to, but it's the truth. Jack's facing charges, remember? He'll have to answer those at the end of the day. And I've got enough to nail Nina, but I think she's going to hang herself eventually. CTU has no senior officers left standing, and this organization looks like hell in a handbasket. Someone has to answer for the body count, the corruption, and the chaos at the end of today."  
  
"So you'll just offer up Jack and Nina." Liz stopped where she was to glare at him, the glare she normally reserved for people under her command who didn't do as they were told. "We've been through the runaround about me and Jack before, so let's just assume that that's past," she said sharply. "As for Nina, yeah, we don't see eye to eye, we're different people, but she backs me up and so now it's my turn. No one goes down today."  
  
"When you get my job, then you can say that. Right now, it's not your move to make."  
  
"Then why the hell are we standing here?"  
  
"Because you're wasting everything you have being here, and for the love of God, I thought you were the one person I could appeal to. At least you haven't tried to shoot me with a tranquilizer gun yet."  
  
Liz looked at him, pissed further off by his addition of the 'yet' to his final sentence. She'd told Jack when he shot Mason that he should have let her handle it, but he had also been right in saying she had been otherwise obligated at the time. And she knew how the game worked anyway. She gave all of herself for Jack, and Mason would give a lot for her, so connecting the dots, Mason gave a lot for Jack. It was their secret, and now he was trying to strangle her with it.  
  
"Bastard," she muttered.  
  
"That's out of line."  
  
"I don't think so. Pardon me, but I don't." She leaned against the wall, folding her arms tight against her chest. "What happened, George?"  
  
"What the hell are you talking about?"  
  
"I love this job. I come in and do my job and I don't give a damn about promotions, raises, transfers. I do my job because it's the right thing to do, and you used to be like that, too. Don't tell me Chappelle's gotten under your skin."  
  
"I'm not Ryan Chappelle."  
  
"No, you're not. But keep down this road and you could be."  
  
For the comparisons between Mason and Chappelle on the CTU floor came often. Mason was the lesser of two evils in their eyes. Liz knew her ally well, not as well as Jack but well, and she could see a thin spiderweb of connections between them. Mason was not Jack and she trusted them both for different reasons. One of the reasons she could never get as close to Mason as she was to Jack was because he had hard-line methodologies, sometimes narrow-minded philosophies, that rammed right up against her own. This was one of those moments where she wanted to slap him.  
  
Instead, she said, "Don't do that to me, George. Please."  
  
He kept looking at her.  
  
"Yes, I'm asking you. Don't turn into someone I don't know. I'll take Chappelle down, and I don't want you going down with him. There's my appeal."  
  
"Elisabeth, what's happened here is not my fault." Mason only used her full name in moments of extreme sincerity, anger or other emotion, and now he looked at her with a quiet voice. "I'm one step above Jack. I don't run the world."  
  
"That's not true. It's everyone's fault, mine, yours, everyone's. Everything is wrong and instead of fixing it we're trying to blame each other." She sighed. "Look at me, George. I started out recruited right out of college, posted to the ECB. I met Jack Bauer, and now I'm second officer to a quickly expanding unit. I've got a sphere of authority bigger than I ever would have imagined, and out of my ECB class I'm the one who's gone the farthest. I'm below Jack and Nina, and yet I make a difference. So don't tell me you can't do the same."  
  
Mason stood, moved toward her. "I'm telling you that this time, we're all outnumbered. We're all outgunned. There's nowhere to go this time, Liz."  
  
"Yes, there is." Liz looked right back into his eyes. "We go through them, because I'd rather die against the wall. My tombstone's picked out, George. It's been from the time I got back from the Hotel Los Angeles. What about yours?"  
  
-To Be Continued- 


End file.
